Neighbour cell relationships between neighbouring cells in a wireless communications network are difficult for mobile network operators to plan and verify manually in real network deployment.
An automatic neighbour relation (ANR) mechanism is introduced in 3GPP Release 10 feature. This feature enables automatic detection of neighbour cells, which are then added to a neighbour cell list. This reduces the cost and effort required in manually planning neighbour cell relationships.
However, a problem with the ANR mechanism is that it results in heavy data traffic between elements of a network, since they must communicate with each other in order to update neighbour cell lists.